Power utilities are concerned with the generation, transmission and distribution of electrical power. The physical assets or devices used in power utilities have specific properties associated with them. Examples of such physical assets include stations, lines, transformers or breakers. The properties include, for instance, a nominal primary voltage or a momentary tap position of a transformer. For maintaining, operating, controlling and/or monitoring these physical assets, various local applications or supervisory systems are employed. The term “local” in the context of the present disclosure does not relate to a geographical property, but refers to the fact that these applications or systems are concerned only with certain aspects of the physical assets and may refer to the same physical asset in a number of different ways.
Typically, supervisory systems are employed for monitoring and controlling the physical assets from a central location, and to that purpose acquire specific properties of the physical assets. The physical assets are represented or modeled in the various local applications or supervisory systems as software objects with attributes related to the specific properties of the physical asset.
In the field of power utility automation, examples of such supervisory systems include a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), a Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) System, a Geographic Information System (GIS), an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Tool and the like. The difference in representation is due to the fact that each system is responsible for different aspects of managing the physical asset. As a result, a physical asset can be identified in different ways by each system. For instance, a CMMS may consider a physical asset such as a transformer to be an asset that has to be maintained, while a SCADA system considers the transformer to be an asset that has to be operated and monitored. Such systems therefore operate on heterogeneous datasets that are not coherent, and their respective representations can therefore be in conflict with each other. Moreover, consolidated access to the various representations acquired by respective systems is cumbersome.
In addition, each of the supervisory systems mentioned allows to modify the underlying data sets, both for an initial setup and continuous updates, i.e. attributes can be changed at runtime, either automatically or initiated through operators and utility personnel. Such modifications on the system side reflect the frequent modifications of e.g. the electrical network of a power utility through commissioning or disposal of physical assets, which subsequently imply changes in one or more of the local application's data sets. The foregoing may result in inconsistent data, e.g. an attribute having different values in the control and maintenance system.
In the U.S. Pat. No. 5,504,890 a system is provided for sharing data among independent data-gathering contributors. Each contributor maintains a database with information pertaining to monitored entities and arranged in data fields. A monitored-entity specific subset of data fields is identified which contains information about the monitored entity that is associated with several of the contributors. Viewing prioritization rule sets are derived which automatically resolve conflicts between information in said monitored-entity subset of data fields. Each viewing prioritization rule set is associated with a particular contributor and is referred to whenever the latter originates the view request or a search query.